Chapter 5 Serena
SERENA
Idon’t sleep that night. I sit on the edge of his bed with his coat in my lap and the weight in its lining still heavy in my head.
I hear the echo of his voice from the next room—handle it, clean it up, no loose ends—and I try to pretend it could mean anything else.
It doesn’t. When he comes back, he watches me like he can read every thought I’m trying to bury.
He doesn’t take the coat from me. He just reaches, slides his fingers under my chin, and tilts my face up.
“Serena.”
My name in his mouth is a soft order. I should pull away.
I don’t. I rise when he draws me up and he kisses me slowly, like he’s making a promise, and that’s the worst part.
I want the promise. I want the lie. He lays me down and his hands are careful, like I’m something fragile and not a mess of nerves.
After, he holds me with his mouth close to my hair and says almost nothing.
I count his heartbeats and try not to keep score.
The next morning, I tell myself to leave.
I shower. I dress. I make breakfast I don’t eat.
He comes into the kitchen in a dark shirt and no tie, and the room changes around him like it always does.
The staff pretend not to look. His guard—Harrison, the one with the wolf-head cufflinks—nods once and ghosts back to the hall.
“Stay for lunch,” Dante says, casual like it’s not a command. “I’ll be back before two.”
“I have another client tomorrow,” I lie.
He is very still. “You don’t.”
My mouth goes dry. “What are you doing today?”
“Accounts,” he says, which I’m starting to understand is a polite word for something else. He kisses me once, quickly. “I’ll call you. Don’t leave the grounds.”
I nod. I don’t promise.
The villa breathes in a different rhythm when he’s gone.
Fewer feet, fewer voices. The gardeners work in the back and pretend the stone lions by the fountain don’t watch them.
I prep a marinade and chop fennel and try not to flinch when the house phone rings in the office down the hall.
The day stretches. He doesn’t call. When the sun dips, I take a plate and a glass of water out to the loggia just to feel air that hasn’t been filtered through silence.
I’m halfway through the water when two men in maintenance jackets come up the service path.
At first I think they’re new. I stand to tell them deliveries go to the east gate, but the taller one says my name and the other already has his hand inside his jacket.
I know, instantly, how stupid I have been.
“Sorry, signorina,” the tall one says, almost gently. “We don’t want to make a scene.”
“Then don’t,” I say, and my voice shakes in a way that makes both of them relax. They think fear means I’ll be easy. “You don’t need to do this.”
“But we do,” one of them replies. “And if you cause trouble, we’ll do it anyway, but it will be messier.”
They steer me toward the side door. I glance to the kitchen, where a porter is stacking plates.
He looks up, looks down, and his hands move faster.
If he saw, he’ll pretend he didn’t. I step wrongly, on purpose, and the shorter one catches my elbow.
The taller one smiles like he has all the time in the world. He smells like cheap cologne and metal.
We turn into the stone corridor under the north stair, where the walls dampen sound. The taller man pulls a plastic tie from his pocket. “Wrists, please.”
“Please,” I echo, because I need breath to keep from fainting, not the tie. “You don’t have to—”
“It’s for everyone’s safety,” he says, as if we are all equal in this safety. A second later, the tie bites my skin. He guides me forward. His hand is polite and firm at the same time.
They don’t take me out the main gate. They use the gardener’s door that feeds into the grove, and there’s a van waiting beyond the hedges.
It isn’t white because that would be too obvious.
It’s gray and it hums like it’s bored. The shorter man opens the side door and the taller one nods me in.
I want to scream. I don’t. I want to run.
I can’t. I step up into the dark belly of the van and sit where they tell me to sit, and when the door thunks shut, the world gets very small.
“Phones?” the driver asks.
“None,” the tall one says. “She’s clean.”
I left my phone on the kitchen counter, but they’re wrong about my being clean.
Every surface of me smells like his house.
It’s on my hair and my clothes and my skin.
The men don’t care. We pull away. I try to keep track of turns, but the driver is good and the city blurs into a map that doesn’t want to be read.
We take a tunnel. We pass a gate with a stone arch and a flag I don’t recognize.
We cross a bridge where the air changes and the van rattles.
I keep thinking if I memorize the order of things, I can tell someone later.
Later is a word I use to keep breathing.
“Who are you?” I finally ask.
“Friends,” the tall one says.
“Of whom?”
“Old names,” he says and smiles, and it’s not an answer. “Don’t worry. He’ll come.”
“Who?”
He doesn’t bother. He knows I know.
We stop in an underground garage that smells like oil and dust. The short one puts a blindfold on me with a hand that’s careful enough to make me angrier than if he’d been rough. He steers me across smooth floor and up a shallow stair. My wrists burn. My mouth tastes like metal.
We pass through a space that sounds big and empty, then into a room that sounds small.
The air is different. Old paper, coffee, a trace of chlorine.
The blindfold comes off. I’m in what used to be an office.
There’s a desk with nothing on it and a strip light that is too bright.
The windows are painted over. The tall man cuts the tie from my wrists and flexes his hands like all of this is tedious.
“Behave, signorina,” he says. “You won’t be here long.”
“How long?”
“Depends on him.”
“Who are you working for?”
“You ask many questions,” he says, but he isn’t offended. “Eat, if you want.” He nods at a paper bag on the desk. “You might be here long enough to be hungry.”
They leave me with the door shut but not locked, because locked would be too honest. Outside the room are footsteps and voices and the hiss of a kettle.
A television murmurs somewhere, low. The paper bag holds two bottles of water and a sandwich, like this is a train station and I missed my train.
I don’t touch it. I sit on the chair instead and look at the blank wall and try to keep my brain from showing me pictures of what he will do when he finds out.
The world around Dante has rules that don’t look like rules from the outside.
People talk a lot about omertà like it’s a romantic idea, but in practice it’s accounting and leverage.
You pay who has to be paid. You remove who can’t be paid.
You keep books. You clean books. You don’t make noise when quiet will do.
The reason they fear him is that he understands when quiet won’t do and he doesn’t hesitate.
He doesn’t make examples. He makes disappearances.
He keeps his word, and everyone knows exactly what it costs when you make a liar of him.
I know this because I have been listening even when I pretended not to be.
I know it because I have heard the names people don’t say loudly.
I know it because I’ve seen Harrison’s eyes when someone he doesn’t like gets near me.
Time stretches. I can hear the tall man and the short man outside the door, talking about football and a cousin’s wedding and how the old families used to do things better, even when better meant more dead.
They call someone Zio, though I doubt he is anyone’s uncle.
A phone rings. It is answered. A voice I don’t know says, “He knows,” and the air in the room tightens like it’s been pulled on wires.
The door opens, and the tall man looks different now. The quiet has drained out of his face. He studies me like I might explode.
“Change of plan,” he says. “We go now.”
“Where?” My mouth feels numb.
“Drop,” he says. “We pass you for proof of life and then you go back. Schoolyard rules.”
He is lying to me or to himself. He gestures, and I stand because there is no other thing to do.
We go down a narrow hall that smells like wet concrete and I feel the building around me—old, reworked, the bones of a laundry or a public bath or an archive.
I count doors. I count steps. We pass a corkboard with two flyers on it, both in Italian, both for classes that won’t happen here.
The tall man holds my arm above the elbow, a grip that says he’s trying to be nice as long as I make it easy.
We come into a bigger room with high ceilings and a wide roll-up door chained half-open.
The garage light on the other side is different, greener.
There’s a second van. There’s a man in a suit too expensive for this place leaning against it, bored and careful at the same time.
He’s young, amber cufflinks, hair too neat.
He taps a message into his phone without looking up.
“Ehi,” the tall man calls. “We’re ready.”
The young man looks up, takes me in, puts his phone away with slow precision, and smiles like we’re all at a birthday party. “Rinaldi says five minutes, then we move.”
Rinaldi. A name I’ve heard in hallways, in cautious tones. Old family. New money. Not friends.